


Awakening

by starcunning (Vannevar)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, FDNH Apocrypha, First Do No Harm, Gen, One-Sided Attraction, POV Second Person, Trans Male Character, Transhumanism, if you're going to do the body dysphoria metaphor do the WHOLE body dysphoria metaphor, or more like 'angela is too deep in her own shit to think about reciprocating'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 23:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7409980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vannevar/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Genji Shimada wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awakening

You wake up, which is unexpected. You don’t know these ceiling tiles, and everything feels a little bit unreal. You remember when you and your brother went diving, as children, and you filled your hands with rocks and stood on the sandy bottom of the sea, and the waves rocked you for long seconds before your lungs burned and you had to scramble to the surface for breath. You feel like that, down to the burning in your chest, but the light is too intense. Too white; too sharp even when you close your eyes.

Someone is calling a name, which is half yours. The voice is a woman’s. She is speaking English.

You correct her: your name is Genji; she wants to be sure you are Genji Shimada. It is an effort, but you tell her that you are. In return, she tells you her name. She is Doctor Angela Ziegler, and she is with Overwatch. You have heard of Overwatch. You wonder if anyone in the world has not. You open your eyes and you look at her. She is young and blonde and her eyes are full of concern, full of focus. She might have been your type, if you had met her somewhere else. Somewhere it was safe for you to meet people—you don’t think this is that. She wants to talk about your treatment options, and you wonder, is it really that bad? She assures you that you will live, it’s only what quality of life you will have that worries her now. You try to smile at her. Your skin is too tight. You lift a hand to touch your face, but it never seems to make it.

She is still talking, but you remember: Hanzo. You remember the death of your father and the way your brother took up his mantle; his shoulders always meant to bear it. You remember all his lectures about your lifestyle and your choices and the way you presented yourself. But he called you Genji while he did it, which is more than you could say for some. Of those, most were people your brother had to deal with. As in, do business. Not as in kill. To do business with them, he had to deal with you.

Your hands will never grasp stones again; your feet will never touch sand. Doctor Angela Ziegler wants to replace them. With what, she is telling you, is up to you. Overwatch is willing to deal with you.

— — — — —

You wake up, and your hands gleam. Your body feels all wrong; your limbs have the wrong weight, and it will be weeks with a sword in your hands before you make sense of yourself. Overwatch has questions, and they ask them all endlessly, while you are with the physical therapist; the psychiatrist; the neurologist; the endocrinologist. With Doctor Ziegler, who you learn everyone just calls Mercy. They want to know about your brother, about your home, about your clan. About your pain and your memories and your body. Mercy wants to know how you’re feeling. You’re feeling strange in your own skin, but you’re used to that by now. She doesn’t look at you with pity. She always meets your eyes, even when they give you the visor. You like her for that, almost enough to forgive her.

— — — — —

You wake up on the day of your official induction as an Overwatch Agent and you wonder if you haven’t made a mistake. Mercy is so, so proud of you. Commander Reyes, for whom you will be working most directly, is indifferent. Reinhardt wants to scoop you up into a hug that crushes bones. He calls you Little Dragon, which you don’t mind, and spends the whole party trading legends with you. He has a laugh which fills the room and a suit of armor he takes off even less often than you shed your exosuit. You like him, and you like Mercy, and you hate the work, because when it begins you feel like you know everyone you kill, and you probably do. You hope you won’t have to kill Hanzo. You hope you will have to kill Hanzo.

— — — — —

You wake up and your clan is in shambles. Your brother is missing. You wonder if he’s dead. You wonder if he ever wakes up and thinks “My brother is dead.” You remember when you were children, and spent all your time and pocket change at the arcade. He always seemed a little annoyed when you beat him, because that wasn’t something you were supposed to do, but he always seemed a little proud, too.

— — — — —

You wake up from a dream about the first time Hanzo introduced you to someone saying “this is my brother,” and the high ceilings and empty halls of Watchpoint: Grand Mesa seem stifling. You go outside to look at the stars, and wander away from the perimeter lights. It feels good, so you keep walking.

— — — — —

You wake up all over the world.

— — — — —

You wake up to a newsfeed broadcast confirming the deaths of Overwatch Commanders Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes. You scan the lists, lungs burning. You don’t find Angela Ziegler or Reinhardt Wilhelm on them, and you breathe again.

— — — — —

You wake up in Washington, DC, expecting rain. It never comes, in defiance of custom. You go to the cemetery, to Arlington, a plain of green more vast than anything you have seen, dotted with white graves like sentinels. Reinhardt Wilhelm sees you, and presses you to his chest, and smells like an entire pine forest. He says he has missed you, Little Dragon; he says he has retired and he hates it. He is quiet when you join the others; he will have more to say later about his friend, Jack Morrison. Angela Ziegler is there, her eyes bruised with lack of sleep. She trembles but does not cry, and when she walks from the graveside she looks at you, for the first time, with regret. You want to hold her, but your arms are cold, and instead you run.

— — — — —

You wake up over the Pacific, and you wonder if you have a gravestone like Jack Morrison’s. You wonder what it says on it.

— — — — —

You wake up and it is night. Jet lag has confused the hours for you; you have almost forgotten it is tomorrow. It is the day you died, or didn’t, and you want to go home. You are surprised to find that Hanamura is not empty. You are more surprised to find that Hanzo comes, carrying incense like sea stones, weighing him down until he almost drowns. You want to call out to him. You don’t dare.

— — — — —

You wake up to a message from Reinhardt letting you know that Overwatch is being decommissioned; even retired, he’s allowed to know that. You send Angela a picture of the sunset, and she doesn’t respond. Even if her lengthy emails have grown less frequent, she usually sends you a snap back. You wait, but not idly. You go to see Utopaea, where you fit right in, visually. The spires of skyscrapers are forged of light. They shift and change before your sight. It feels like the moment just before you realized you weren’t dead, recessed lights like knives in your eyes.

Angela sends you pictures in return, of cities all over Europe. You have not known her to do this. Usually she sends words, sometimes she sends photos of herself; of her food or her desk. She does not do what you do and send landmarks without context. You wonder if she feels as restless as you do, but you remember Reinhardt’s message. You realize when she sends you a photograph of the Colossus of Ilios what her destinations are. You move west, as though drawn inexorably back toward these people you walked away from.

In Moscow, not for the first time, someone mistakes you for an Omnic. He throws a punch and by instinct you break his elbow, and then you only go out in public when it’s quiet. You stay underground, which probably does not help the perception, given what you’ve been told about most cities.

Angela goes to Vienna, and you miss her in France.

— — — — —

You wake up in Seville, hoping you’ve guessed right. You visit the Alcázar. You find the geometry elegant; you think Hanzo would too, and it doesn’t hurt as much as you expected. You send Angela a snap. She sends one back: a river beside a pavilion, in the garden of a dead king. You go to her. She is so, so beautiful with the sun in her hair; she has never needed the halo they gave her with her Valkyrie suit. Her sunglasses blank her expression, but from the way she purses her lips you know what to expect behind them. She wears a leather jacket draped over her shoulders like a cape—like a shroud, you correct yourself, because you know that shade of blue. You look at her, regal and sad and never, ever yours, and you send her a photograph of how she looks in that moment, leaning against her motorcycle, because you want her to know just how beautiful she is to you. You don’t care what she does with the knowing. You just want the pain to stop.

— — — — —

You wake up the next morning and you go with her to Gibraltar, and you don’t talk on the way there, and you do talk when you get there, the flags all hanging like mourners halfway up their poles. You want to help her, because she helped you once, but you don’t know what to say. Her loss goes deeper than you’d thought, deeper than her half-stripped lab and her UN-Blue jacket betray. You want to tell her she is not dead; you want to tell her there is life after this. You want to, but you tell it wrong, and you may as well be jabbing your fingers into raw wounds to make her scream, the way her face falters. You want to reach across the fathoms and pull her to the surface, but you have hurt her; you are hurting, and you run, like a coward.

— — — — —

You wake up, ashamed. She has told you not to make her your mission, but you wish you had stayed and told her that she wasn’t—that she was your friend, one of your only friends. You want to tell her you love her, but you don’t know how you love her, so you don’t. You go back and she is long gone, and she does not send you a new snap with her next destination. She does not send you anything at all, not for a long, long time, and you wander the world. You talk to Reinhardt, sometimes, who is wandering too, a Knight-Errant. You can’t haunt Europe and you can’t go home, so you go south.

— — — — —

You wake up in Numbani, where they have just named a street after the woman responsible for guiding Overwatch through the Omnic Crisis. Omnics live here, and so do humans, and both of them sees you as the other, and you will never find a place, because you are neither. The Shambali, already famous, come to celebrate. One of them stops to regard you. You wonder what the monk sees, not quite sure where to look upon that face.

His name, you find out later, is Tekhartha Zenyatta. His brother is the more famous, and if you relate to nothing else about him, you understand that. You wonder if he looks at you and sees a project; when he invites you to the monastery, you are almost sure of it.

— — — — —

You wake up there anyway, after weeks of thinking and a long time running, and longer climbing. You are running to, you tell yourself. You assure yourself this is progress. Zenyatta wakes you every morning. He leads you through exercises that remind you of your earliest training, that remind you of physical therapy with Overwatch. He encourages you to become familiar with your body, with all of your body, and you balk. Your body has felt foreign to you for a long, long time. He is patient. He respects your discomfort. He tells you a bit about himself, about how he has come to interpret the feedback from his systems the way one might a stimulus in a body. You admit that you don’t need to do that; your prosthetics have been broached, where possible, to your nerves. Zenyatta calls your body a miracle, and for a long time you disagree.

— — — — —

You wake up to a long email from Angela Ziegler about that day in Gibraltar, and about Overwatch’s decision to remake you, and she begs your forgiveness for ruining your life. It’s only when you start to write back that she didn’t, that she hasn’t, that you realize you mean it. You send her a snap of the sunlight glittering on the mountains. You send her one of your face: unmasked and scarred and smiling.

— — — — —

You wake up when your phone rings. The line reads Angela Ziegler, and you don’t get any further than greeting her before she hangs up. You text Reinhardt, and he has no idea what’s going on, but you spend a few hours catching up. He tells you about his new mechanic, Brigitte, and how his body aches without the armor to hold him up, and he makes jokes about the Little Dragon from the tallest mountain. Angela emails you, later, and from the photos, you think for a moment she’s come to you, but she hasn’t. She has gone to the Antarctic to save lives the rest of the world forgot, and you wish you could assuage her guilty soul.

— — — — —

You wake up when someone calls your name. Genji. It has been a long time since anyone called you anything else. Mercy has always called you by your name, since you told it to her. So has Reinhardt. So has Zenyatta. It feels nice.

— — — — —

You wake up. The wind is frigid, and you can feel it on your skin; on your prosthetics. The sensations are different, but they are no longer at war. You have very little with you here: you have a few books, a few relics from home. You have a photograph of you and Hanzo. The Shimada brothers. You like to look at it, sometimes, but you no longer wish you could go back there. You could decouple your prosthetics from the receptors that transmit sensation to the rest of your body. You used to. You don’t want to, now. You feel the air on your chest and on your arms, and all of it is you. You realize that you are still a human. You realize you are also, in some ways, an Omnic. But if your master has a soul, how did you ever doubt that you did?

— — — — —

You wake up.

You wake up.

You wake up.


End file.
